In today""s environment where consumers and companies are deluged with mail that includes bills, special offers, rebates, incentive programs, subscriptions, membership dues, charitable organizations, invitations, catalogs, coupons, and many other pieces, it has become more and more difficult to get responses from recipients. Additionally when recipients do respond it takes a longer time for them to perform a response. One common tactic that companies have used is prepaid postage or Business Reply Mail offered by the United States Postal Service. Business Reply Mail allows companies and individuals to pay the cost of delivery for responses that are received. Generally, prepaid postage effectuates greater response rates from recipients. With prepaid postage, recipients are saved the step of affixing postage to an envelope. But even with prepaid postage there is no urgency created and accordingly no guaranteed increase in actual response time. Prepaid postage does not engender a sense of urgency or action with the recipient. Recipients know that they can use the prepaid postage at any time, and respond at their leisure, and the postage will still be paid. Accordingly, prepaid postage merely facilitates action, but does not create or cause action.
Additionally in the case of Business Reply Mail, it has no expiration, and will be forwarded to the company at any location in the country as long as the Business has an active account with the Postal Service. Conceivably a company could offer a special unique promotion and receive a reply card or envelope 5 years later. The promotion may have been long over and no longer relevant, yet they would be obligated to receive said items and pay said postage.
With package delivery companies, such as FedEx, Airborne Express, UPS, and others, the method presently offered to prompt a quick response with customers is to schedule a pick-up for them. In these instances, for example, a customer may wish to return an item purchased. The customer contacts the company, who agrees to take the return, and the company in turn contacts the delivery company to schedule a pick-up. The delivery company then contacts the customer to schedule a pick-up. This requires many unnecessary steps for both the customer and the company. It requires the company to staff additional customer service representatives, it requires the delivery company to have additional customer service representatives, and it requires the customer to deal with all of them. It also does not effectuate any time controlled prepaid delivery with a predetermined effective expiration date.
Another instance where the system creates problems is in the case of prepaid returns by catalog companies. For example many catalog companies will agree to pay the delivery cost of returns. Accordingly they send the customer a prepaid delivery slip, and the customer then uses that slip to send off the package. The longer it takes the customer to send the item back to the company, the longer it takes to get that item back into circulation, and ultimately the longer it takes to make the sale. This is because prepaid delivery slips do not have any form of expiration date. These delivery slips are all open ended, and accordingly can be utilized by a customer at any time.
Companies and individuals will always need to improve customer""s response times. With improved response times, companies and individuals can gauge effectiveness of advertising, the quality and appropriateness of a targeted demographic profile, improve cash flow, increase dialogue with the recipient, improve planning and preparation, facilitate company growth, etc. Clearly, increasing response rates of groups and individuals would provide enormous benefits to those groups issuing the item for response.